"In January of 2012 I wrote 3 consecutive articles for the Daily Kos. The first was entitled "Loowatch.com and Radical Islam". Here I pointed out the how Loonwatch only deflects criticism of radical Islam. I was also critical of Islamic theology while noting over and over that most Muslims were peaceful. The comments section of Daily Kos made me feel like I was attending my own funeral. It was like a public stoning. There wasn't much in the way of responding to any of the points laid out in my article but hundreds of comments accusing me of being "right wing" a "bigot" and an "lslamophobe". This was disappointing." (source)
Loonwatch.com and Radical Islam
Let me just come right out by saying that the vast majority of the estimated 1.67 billion Muslims around the world are clearly not terrorists. The newly coined term “Islamophobia” describes an irrational fear of Islam. But for LoonWatch.com any criticism of the Koran or of violent Jihad - even those criticisms that might have some legitimacy to them - even of radical Islam, are branded as Islamophobia and anyone who dares to raise questions about the nearly constant acts of Jihad going on increasingly around the world today is labeled a “Loon” - thus the title of their blog, LoonWatch.com.
It seems that Loonwatch is pretty much exclusively concerned with exposing the perceived enemies of Islam, including a compulsive and obsessive tit for tat over anything that Robert Spencer, of JihadWatch.com had to say. Unlike Pamela Geller or that nut in Florida who was preoccupied with burning the Koran, Spencer, whom I don't see eye to eye with either (I feel he might also be religiously motivated), presents himself in a rather rational, sober and scholarly fashion and I might add that neither he nor the other "Loons" have bombs strapped to them - only words. Something we cannot say for so many, many defenders of Islam.
Anyone can take a short stroll through YouTube and find numerous videos translated into English of Islamic clerics from many parts of the world calling for the death of all Jews, the Islamic takeover of the world, applauding the actions of Islamic terrorists and defending the practice of beating women, forcing young girls to marry grown men and promoting the most radical forms of Sharia (Islamic) Law. Surely Loonwatch.com has noticed this, but they have nothing to say on the subject - only criticism and attacks on anyone who dare suggest that within the Islamic world there might be room for improvement.
Quran (48:29) - "Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard (ruthless) against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves"
In time I became very disappointed by the deafening silence on the part of Loonwatch.com when it came to speaking out against the seemingly constant acts of Islamic terrorism, women in Islamic countries being stoned to death as a punishment for being raped, female genital mutilation, the rise of forced Islamic law in Libya, Tunisia and the rise of Islamism in Egypt, the many abuses that are so rampant in so much of the Islamic world today. Loonwatch.com, in my opinion, has an obligation to do more than stand by silently as if to give their consent while only focusing on defending "the religion of peace".
After over a year of communication with Loonwatch.com in the making of "Not Welcome" I have come to the realization that this organization is fundamentally a radical Islamic front, covering up for terrorism, spreading distorted information about the reality of rapidly spreading Islamic fundamentalism - through lies of omission. To tell a half truth is to tell a lie and the lie that Loonwatch.com tells everyday is to cover up the atrocities within Islam and only focus on attacking its critics.
Quran (2:191-193) - "And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution [of Muslims] is worse than slaughter [of non-believers]...
I trust that everyone who reads this can think for yourself, but my sense is that if you are affiliated with this site: Loonwatch.com you are perhaps unknowingly supporting a group with terrorist / Islamist sympathies. Think of those Germans who did not stand up against or speak out against Hitler. And note the distinction between being a German, which is of course perfectly fine, and through silence giving ones consent for the atrocities of the Nazi regime, which is quite another thing entirely. We see here a similar scenario more and more with highly vocal Muslim representatives who have much to say about being percecuted wrongly but nothing much to say about Jihad and the violence associated with fundamentalist Islam.
Please note that there is a difference between the belief system called Islam and a person calling themselves a Muslim. I have tolerance for Muslims as I would for any other human being. But Islam as a belief system is another matter.
Obviously I feel strongly that Muslims have the same rights as everyone else to practice their religion in peace. But when an organization goes beyond that, I will speak up. My sense is that my movie "Not Welcome" makes it abundantly clear that I do support religious freedom for all and loath Islamophobia (the irrational fear of Islam). But I will call out anyone I am in contact with if they also have "Islamist" or terrorist sympathies.
In summary, it is clear that Loonwatch.com is in fact something of a terrorist spin control network, lacking basic empathy for human beings who are being victimized daily by the human rights abuses of fundamentalist Islam.
To give some perspective, what if any one of us created a news source whose only purpose was to attack and expose those people who had criticized American foreign policy, for instance, but we were totally unwilling to talk about what violence the American government had done and was doing that is wrong and in our name? Kind of sounds like Fox "News" actually. That is essentially what you have with Loonwatch.com and its relationship to radical Islam. So why would they only defend Allah while never holding the many radical Muslims accountable? Because the Koran commands them to do so - and when you follow the Koran literally like that - even when to do so defies basic empathy for other human beings... well, isn't that what fundamentalism is?
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How & Why Loonwatch.com is a Terrorist Spin Control Network
[...] Loonwatch unconditionally attacks criticism of Islam but they refuse to criticize the many, many Islamic clerics and terrorists who are hurting people in the name of Islam. Should a person have something to say publicly questioning the funneling of monies from Islamic charities to Islamic terrorist networks, Loonwatch is there to call them a “Loon” for even raising the question. That’s quite a clever system – a form of radical Islamic McCarthyism it seems – with the first line of defense being a blogoshere of misinformed infidels who will blurt out the word “Islamophobe” at the slightest mention that within Islam there might be a problem brewing. What a clever design. [...]
First let me make it clear that there is a difference between a Muslim and Islam. One is a human being and the other is a religious doctrine. No matter how many times I repeat this, there will always be a fair share of people who refuse to comprehend it and will go on the attack mode saying that I am insulting Muslims. Such was the case when I wrote an article entitled “Loonwatch.com and Radical Islam”
The next day when I received the usual Loonwatch email containing the next round of articles on who they had singled out to be a “Loon” I saw a photograph of my own face blown up with the words “Loon At Large” over it. The article itself ended with a demand that I be silenced and a link to Daily Kos asking people to write in and demand that I be censored.
My assertion in the article was and is that Loonwatch is protecting Jihadists and terrorists through lies of omission. Criticism ranged from emails I received saying that “it was about time someone stood up to Loonwatch”, to people who simply disagreed and felt Loonwatch to be a legitimate Islamophobia watchdog site and that my point was a bit of a stretch, to those who immediately took to the blogosphere, parroting all of the talking points of the Loonwatch smear piece, saying that I was “right wing” and a follower of Robert Spencer and a bigot and so on.
So how can it be that I could make a documentary defending the rights of an Islamic community to build a 53,000 square foot mega mosque and then only months later publish an article with so many criticisms of Islam while accusing a major Islamic blog of being a “terrorist spin control network”? Am I as they say, just somebody with a split personality, or a “Loon” or some kind of an attention-seeking bigot? What happened?
What happened is that my investigation into the theology of Islam continued. And I started to notice more and more of a correlation between some of the violent passages in the Koran and the Hadiths and many of the acts of brutality being carried out by radical Muslims in the world – mostly overseas.
Then when I posted some of these news articles, from Al Jazeera and other international news sources on my Facebook wall, lively discussions and sometimes even debates took place concerning the fact that although the Koran very clearly commands violence in a few passages, most Muslims do not take those passages literally. And thank God, or Allah or Zeus or whoever one imagines to be ruling over the world that most Muslims do not follow all of the commandments in the Koran to the letter or take those dark passages literally.
During those debates I was threatened twice. The first time was from a Muslim computer programmer out of Saudi Arabia who told me he was going to destroy me after I said that I thought Mohammed was too violent, had killed too many people to be considered a holy man (Mohammed personally beheaded hundreds of people and is considered the ideal man in Islam). I did not take this threat too seriously but soon after my website was hit with a denial of service attack. The second threat came from a Muslim man in New York who told me “I will cut off your dick and stuff it down your throat”. This time I not only contacted Facebook but also contacted the FBI.
While all of this was happening I continued to receive newsletter emails from Loonwatch.com every few days. Their content was mostly obsessed with Robert Spencer and his blog called JihadWatch.com so I put myself on that mailing list as well. It was more than just strange to be receiving these two newsletters every week, each with their own bias. Spencer was meticulously pointing out nearly every act of Islamic inspired violence around the world while Loonwatch responded, tit for tat, by calling him a “Loon” over and over. I’m not sure what Spencer’s preoccupation with Jihad is really all about. He seems a little too cozy with the radical Evangelicals to me. That said, when I click on the links in his articles – for instance this one: “I was doing my duty as a Muslim,' says father who handed out leaflets saying gay people should be hanged” sure enough, Spencer wasn’t making this stuff up. In fact the Daily Mail in the UK did report on several Muslim men handing out fliers demanding that homosexuals be executed by way of hanging for disobeying Islam – in England.
Spencer’s take on this is naturally seen through the lens of his own sense of reality – a reality strongly motivated by his own reasons - which are not entirely clear to me. Loonwatch would have us believe that Spencer hates all Muslims, but that is not the impression I come away with. That Loonwatch hates Robert Spencer will become immediately self evident to anyone who browses their site. And how does Loonwatch report on the many, many Islamic inspired hate crimes in the world today? By waiting for someone to say anything critical about them and then branding that person a “Loon”.
The Holy Land Foundation was the largest Islamic charity in the United States. Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, it was originally known as Occupied Land Fund. In 2007, federal prosecutors brought charges against the organization for funding Hamas and other "Islamic terrorist organizations". Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) was founded in 1987 (The charter exhibits the influence of anti-Jew conspiracy theories throughout, as evidenced by the explicit mention of the "The Protocols of the Elder of Zion,") as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (an organization often credited as being the mother ship for Al Queda, those followers of “the religion of peace” who brought us 9/11). In the 1920s, an Egyptian school teacher, Hassan al-Banna, gathered discontent Muslims to found the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to a former prosecutor with the US Justice Department, John Loftus, “Al-Banna formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna was a devout admirer of Adolf Hitler and wrote to him frequently.” Loftus adds that Al-Banna was so persistent in his “admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930s Al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence. With the goal of the Third Reich to develop the Muslim Brotherhood as an army inside Egypt.
For what it’s worth, here is what WikiPedia says about the connection between Hamas and the Council on American Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.):
“Critics of CAIR, including six members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, have alleged ties between the CAIR founders and Hamas. The founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, had earlier been officers of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), described by a former FBI analyst and US Treasury Department intelligence official as "intimately tied to the most senior Hamas leadership." Both Ahmad and Awad participated in a meeting held in Philadelphia on October 3, 1993, that involved senior leaders of Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation (which was designated in 1995 by Executive Order, and later convicted in court, as an organization that had raised millions of dollars for Hamas) , and the IAP. Based on electronic surveillance of the meeting, the FBI reported that "the participants went to great length and spent much effort hiding their association with the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas]." Participants at the meeting discussed forming a "political organization and public relations" body, "whose Islamic hue is not very conspicuous."
CAIR raised suspicions by raising its annual budget of around $3 million (as of 2007) in part through large donations from people and foundations identified with Arab governments.
How does this relate to Loonwatch? Loonwatch works with CAIR by broadcasting CAIR's point of view. They are very consistent on this. Loonwatch is never in disagreement with CAIR. CAIR thanks Loonwatch in their "Hate Report".
Connecting all of these dots is deeply, deeply concerning. Here is the math: Out of the Muslim Brotherhood come a number of terrorist organizations including Al Queda and Hamas. Out of Hamas comes C.A.I.R. and Loonwatch becomes a mirror for anything that C.A.I.R. wants to convey to Americans about how harmless Islam is. Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but it sure does not look right.
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